Friday, November 8, 2013

Profone GSM tracker advancements

Profone GSMTracker (link) is a web based app to query location of cell phone. Using LAC and CellID data obtained from your phone, the online tool can find its proximate location in no time. As a matter of fact, the location it returns is where the cell tower stands, which connect your phone to the carrier's network.

However, if you find the location of the cell tower, it's not difficult to find the phone which connects to the base station as each cell tower only covers a limited area depending on the density of towers. In general there will be more towers in cities than in urban areas. If you have data from at least three cell phone towers, you can precisely pinpoint a mobile device.

Profone tracker now provides multi-towers query. That is, it can find neighboring base stations surrounding a specific station. Of course it only works when the database has enough entries. For researchers, this is an important functionality as it provides more data.

In the meantime, a new feature will be added. Some of you must be interested to know who are also using this tool and where they are. This is what Profone tracker is to accomplish. It intends to provide a small tool showing which cell towers are being searched and where they are located. Since it's only a one-page tool, only about ten searches will be displayed. But that is interesting too.

In the long run raw location data will be available for download. Those who are going to build a location server should benefit from this huge load of data as it's priceless.

Stay tuned and more news will come soon! Meanwhile, connect with Profone GSMTracker on Facebook.